Slogans, I think, get a bum rap. Slogans are a neat, tidy and succinct method of conveying often complex ideas. I disagree that slogans trivialize, discourse and encourage the compressing of complex ideas into six words that will fit conveniently on a bumper sticker.

If we lived in a less visual age, I'd probably be of a different opinion. But these days, when so much of life is quick-cut, pull-down menu-and-icon-driven, a quick, quippy slogan has a far more profound effect than any 10,000 word tract or treatise. Take the example of the following slogan on a bumper sticker I saw recently (and happily enough, quite in tune with the EP being reviewed here):

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

Wow. My inner misogynist felt that one between his beer-bleary wife-beating eyes! And he was already pretty punch-drunk after the drubbing he received from several listens to DJ Vadim's collaboration with poet Sarah Jones. These two have essentially updated Gil Scott Heron's proto-rap rant, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and replaced race-related sloganeering with feminist hectorings.

So Sarah Jones metamorphosizes Heron's famous hookline into "Your revolution will not happen between these thighs," and carries on by railing against misogyny and the shopping list of luxury items and victuals that most popular rap stars claim they have ready access to. As such, Jones picks an easy target-- how many bleeding-heart liberals amongst us find Eminem to stick in our First Amendment-respecting craw? But Jones doesn't fully address the far more pernicious self-loathing politics of Lil' Kim and her shameless ilk.

These ideological pedantries aside, the substantial message within Your Revolution benefits from DJ Vadim's ever-sparse production. Vadim is the Russian DJ who's used door hinges as percussion instruments. His concrete approach to hip-hop, he hopes, will prevent the syrupy over-production that characterizes modern R&B; from gaining world domination. To this end, Vadim and his associates seem dedicated to stripping all but beats from a track. Theirs is a dubby sensibility that, unfortunately for Vadim et al., has financially rewarded only the dexterous Timbaland.

The remixes that bulk out this release add somewhat distracting, thumping, slightly detuned piano chords, chuggy-chuggy rock guitars, wrist-wrecking turntablistic wackery and sub-bass bursts. None of any of these elements substantially detracts from Jones' punning, highly referential "lyrical douche" (her own metaphor), but I can't help but think that all of this could have been as effectively stated as the single sample in a brutal funk Meat Beat Manifesto assault. The present remixes are too cozy and restrained for Jones' radical message to have any chance of being taken by the rap-buying mallrat as anything more than a proxy Benetton social conscience ad.

-Paul Cooper